Data Documents and Common Sense
What can be so difficult in creating a sensible standard for Structured Data Documents? To understand why they tend to get improved into unusable complexity, I’ll need to explain a bit of background.
2025-01-06
Design and Theory
2025-01-08 (first published: 2025-01-03)
515 reads
2024-12-20
1,675 reads
Department of Redundancy Department
Ever wonder all the reasons that we use databases instead of file systems? While we don’t think of it too much anymore, the first reason that databases came into existence was to remove redundancies.
2024-04-12
Getting Out of Character
In this article, Joe Celko gives us a history of the different character sets that are used in computing and how that can pertain to your usage in relational databases. Some of these you may have never heard of!
2023-05-17
The VALUES clause or building tables out of nothing
The VALUES clause makes inserting literal values into a table simple and easy. In this article, Joe Celko explains how to use the VALUES clause.
2022-07-01
Combinations, permutations, and derangements
Joe Celko explains how several mathematical concepts, combinations, permutations, and derangements, relate to databases.
2022-06-01
The problem with averages
Everyone learns to calculate an average in school, but, as Joe Celko shows, there are better ways to summarize data.
2022-03-25
Much Ado about nothing: missing data
Joe Celko explains how missing data is handled from the printing press to databases.
2021-07-26
Constraints and declarative referential integrity
Database systems have powerful features built right in that can ensure the integrity of data. In this article, Joe Celko discusses keys and constraints.
2021-05-28
Blogs
Reality (And Limits) of Instant File Initialization for Transaction Logs in SQL Server 2022
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Forums
Adding and Dropping Columns II
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Leveraging DuckDB for OLAP Workloads: The Fabric Modern Data Platform
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More Documentation is Needed
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Question of the Day
Adding and Dropping Columns II
I have this table in my SQL Server 2022 database:
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[CityList] ( [CityNameID] [int] NOT NULL IDENTITY(1, 1), [CityName] [varchar] (30) , [Country2] [char] (3), [stateprovince2] [char] (2), [Country] [char] (3), [stateprovince] [char] ) ON [PRIMARY] GOI decide to drop the stateprovince2 and country2 columns. What code should I use? See possible answers